The Tree Climber’s Guide

Fast forward a thousand years and some truly remarkable tree climbers emerge from the 18th century. In the forests of France and Germany hunting parties discovered several instances of children living wild, subsisting alone deep in the woods. Peter the Wild Boy, who later became a court celebrity in England, was discovered ‘walking on his hands and feet, climbing trees like a squirrel, and feeding on grass and moss’. Attempts to capture him resulted in the ‘savage’ taking refuge in a tree that had to be cut down in order to catch him. A similar story emerged in the 1790s, when three hunters came across a boy covered in scars living in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance. Again, when they attempted to capture him the child’s first instinct was to climb a tree, from which he was subsequently dragged down. Both Peter and Victor, the second boy, were found to be living on forest flora – bark, berries and roots – and seemed to have reverted to nesting in the trees.

Although their stories have a tragic origin – they were most likely abandoned as children – both boys demonstrate the remarkable ability of humans to survive in the wild and our instinctual preference for seeking shelter in the trees. During the course of their subsequent lives, unhappily paraded as freaks, they often attempted to escape back into the forest.

More extraordinary than either case is that of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc. In 1731, on the outskirts of the French commune of Songy, a thief clothed in animal skins was found stealing apples from an orchard. The villagers set a bulldog upon the intruder, who was said to have struck it dead with a single blow. Pursued by a mob, the mysterious figure vanished back into the nearby forest, swinging from branch to branch across the tree tops. A vengeful party was soon sent after the thief, who turned out to be a girl of nineteen living off raw meat and fish, and sleeping in the canopy of a tree.

‘The Shepherd’s Beast’, as the new marvel was known, spent the following years of her life sequestered in a series of convents. This sudden change to a cloistered living space and cooked food destroyed her previously robust constitution. Within a few weeks all of her teeth fell out and she was given her new name, redolent of Christian morality.

Unique among such cases, Marie-Angélique recovered the power of speech and was ‘integrated’ back into society, where her full story slowly came to light. She was found to be of Native American origin and had been living wild for a decade or more. Her return was considered a triumph of civilisation, and her restoration to speech a victory for rational thought. In reality, her captors had undone years of instinctual living, caging the most well-adapted tree dweller since the age of the Great Ape.

In the 20th century the number of children and adults climbing trees appears to have been declining down the generations. We already seem divorced from our grandparents, to whom exploring was an essential part of play. David Haffner, a climber from Coventry in his mid-seventies, sent me an account of his childhood escapades on the city’s outskirts. In this glorious 1950s tale of derring-do, a boy named Tom climbs a tall elm to reach a linnet’s nest high up in its branches. Thirty feet above the ground, egged on by his companions, Tom makes a desperate move, slips from a branch and comes crashing down into a thicket of elm saplings. Miraculously, he survives with no more than a few cuts and bruises. David’s story is one of many from an era when a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ mentality prevailed. For all its potential horror, the tale is a love letter to natural adventure and the antithesis of today’s risk-averse culture.

Another example of the generation gap is found in a curious American legal case brought to court in 1919. The lawsuit involved a power company forced to pay damages to the father of a boy killed while climbing a tree on common ground, through which electricity cables had been strung. The judgment concluded that the boy had broken no laws and that ‘courts further realise that children are apt to climb trees’. It’s hard to imagine a similar case today, when children and adults alike are more likely to be plugged into headphones and screens than found up in the branches. There are currently several laws against climbing trees in public spaces, and as recently as 2012 Enfield council attempted to ban the practice altogether in its parks and green spaces.

In spite of these societal shifts, it is hardly surprising that the impulse to climb trees remains strong; the art is lost but the memory lives on. Abandon a small child in the depths of a forest and, after much sobbing at their predicament, you might well find them up a tree. Walk through a city park on a summer’s day and observe groups of toddlers crowded around the base of tall oaks, desperately trying to reach the branches. Their parents, each some distance apart, will probably be playing on their phones. We are less cut off from our deep history than from our own childhood.

How then do we stop ourselves devolving from climbing children to earthbound adults? Happily, the damage done is only superficial and it is easier to discard the short years of our nurture than the fundamental draw of our nature. Climbing, we regress back beyond our industrial present, rejoining the scramblers of the past and retracing our ancestral tree into its shrouded pre-history. The hard surfaces of the city’s streets yield to an older kingdom, where tunnels of webbed branch and briar superimpose themselves on the human-built environment. Tomorrow, you can step out of your front door and into a tree, reclaiming a forgotten birthright; it only takes a moment to return over the threshold of the first branch.

My own journey back to the trees began on a day shadowed by storm cloud, the end of summer with a fierce wind funnelling through central London and sweeping all before it. I was working in an office housed on the top floor of an old terrace. The building faced Regent’s Park but a brick parapet blocked the window view, built to hide the old servant’s quarters from the high society of the day. Although we could glimpse a slice of sky, the park remained invisible. Our only other reminder of the world outside was a London plane that grew to the full height of the building, the tips of its highest branches scratching at the window panes.

That morning the weather had caused chaos in the artificial order of our office. Torrential rain had opened a hidden sluice gate in the building’s plasterwork and a river of water descended, channelled by the carpet between the desks into a great indoor delta. The building’s caretaker had bravely opened a skylight in search of the flood’s source but returned unenlightened. Foolishly, he left the ladder and the key to the roof behind him. When the office emptied out at lunch I seized my chance to finally see the view.

Stepping out onto the lead roof, I was nearly blown clean over the edge by the wind. I latched on to the skylight’s surround like a limpet and gazed in awe at the panorama beyond the gutter. Regent’s Park stretched across my entire field of vision, the summer canopy conjoined into a single roiling green sea, the tree tops looking like another world hanging over London. Everywhere, thick foliage performed a furious dance, the willow’s long locks thrashing against the oak’s Afro, the whole scene bursting with a life far removed from my own. In contrast, my desk was locked in a desensitised world, a static realm where the only movements were the twitching of plastic mice. It was a rare awakening.

In one of life’s happy coincidences I had recently begun reading the adventures of Cosimo, a little-known hero sprung from the imagination of Italo Calvino. In his 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, the author describes a mythical Italian valley where the forest grows so thick that each tree interlaces with the next. Into this wooded wonderland the figure of Cosimo is released, a kind of 18th-century Tarzan. Climbing out of his father’s dining-room window in protest at being forced to eat snails, Cosimo disappears into the canopy and refuses to return. His regular aerial pastimes include reading and hunting, then later, seducing women and starting revolutions. He lives out the rest of his days far from the circumscribed routine of his former life. Over the course of the novel he acquires ‘bandy legs and long monkey-like arms’, returning to the physiognomy of his ape ancestors while cultivating a tree-top philosophy all of his own. He never again sets foot on the ground, not even in death.

Under the thick summer verdure of Regent’s Park, Cosimo’s ‘Republic of Arborea’, a land where roaming the canopy was as easy as crossing the street, did not seem so distant. I imagined opening the office window, five floors off the ground, climbing over the parapet and leaping onto the outstretched arm of the plane tree. By a series of bridges and ladders I’d make my way down and out across the street, dropping from the final branch into the elusive Eden on the far side. In reality I took the lift.

Five minutes later I found myself walking across the windswept park lawns. Here and there the branches of separate trees linked overhead, and I pictured Cosimo skipping across the divides. Although careful planting schemes displaced the natural wilderness in my head, the violent weather made rose beds and box hedges look as wild as an untamed wood. Before long the rain returned and I ran for the shelter of a pine.

Under the canopy the sound of the storm intensified, a waterfall now ringing the tree’s perimeter. Placing a hand on the lowest branch level with my chest, I looked up into the pine’s conical interior. Stretching far above, the crown seemed like a safe haven even as its uppermost branches swayed out of sight. Cautiously, I stepped over the first rung and out onto the next, the tree’s thick arms offering a fixed ladder. My confidence soon began to grow, and before long I was high above the park and sitting on a wide crossbar. Looking down on a blustery London from this new habitat, I felt strangely protected. To the south, the city rolled out beyond the borders of the park and, although less than ten minutes’ walk from my office, I already felt a world apart.

Returning to work, sodden and with sap-covered hands, I struggled to settle back into my daily routine. The material pleasures of city life paled in comparison with my experience of climbing the tree. Sitting in the storm-tossed pine, my whole body cradled by the branches, had awoken a dormant escapist. The four walls of my office were no longer protection against the weather but an insentient cage.

Weeks later I was still dwelling on that same five minutes spent perched in the tree, and every lunch break I strayed back into the park, searching for a new tower to climb. These brief interludes between hours of phone calls, emails and spreadsheets became more protracted, and my colleagues’ suspicions deepened. I would return to work with a head full of curling branches and feathered skylines, and when there was no alternative but to sit at my desk I searched online for traces of other climbers in the city. But I found none. The only men and women who seemed to scale the trees were, like Cosimo, the figments of others’ imaginations.

The history of climbing trees is composed as much from myth as recorded deed. Our memories of an older, entangled world, a life lived in the forests, express themselves across the full scope of our fiction and fairy tale.

Alongside Cosimo are other heroes who cast aside the everyday and returned to the trees. Memorable among these are Robin, John and Harold in the wildwood classic Brendon Chase, a band of brothers who escape the guardianship of their ‘iron-grey’ aunt and disappear into the woods for eight months, refusing to return to school. Hiding out in the hollowed trunk of an old oak, the three boys are enriched by their experience of living wild; making beds of bracken, swimming in hollows, stealing wild honey and climbing trees. The novel contrasts the daily wonder of the woods with the strictures of the ‘civilised’ world. In one of its most vivid scenes, Robin climbs a giant pine in order to steal an egg from a honey buzzard’s nest. The terror he feels in the topmost branches, hanging high above the other trees, is contrasted with the solace of the thick trunk and its rough bark. In both The Baron in the Trees and Brendon Chase, climbing trees is a way of resisting the constraints of society, whether the stifling influence of a controlling father or the numbing routine of a 1920s boarding school.

Many of our popular legends spring from the forest, the dwelling place of elves and witches, dryads and nymphs, and a whole cast of characters born of folktale, from Baba Yaga to Little Red Riding Hood. In this rich tradition, climbing trees often serves as a refuge from the evils of the world.

One of my favourites climbing tales is The Minpins, the last story Roald Dahl wrote before his death. The protagonist, Little Billy, ignores his mother’s words of warning and is tempted into the ominous Forest of Sin, a brooding presence on the far side of the village lane. Lost in the trees, he finds himself pursued by a terrifying monster of the forest floor, the notorious ‘Bloodsucking, Toothplucking, Stonechucking Spittler’. In desperation, Billy jumps into the only tree offering salvation and, terrified, climbs branch over branch, higher and higher, only stopping when he is completely exhausted. Looking around him, Billy discovers the emerald interior of a giant beech. He watches in fascination as hundreds of little doors open in the bark of the branches, windows into the interior of a miniature city, the realm of the Minpins. Befriending this diminutive race, Billy finds a self-sufficient society at one with nature. The Minpins even harness the flight of birds to transport them from tree to tree, and our hero leaves the beech on the back of an improbably massive swan, soaring over the dreaded Spittler and triumphantly leading the monster to its doom in the depths of a lake. The story is a wonderful enticement to children and adults alike: climb a tree and you will escape the horrors of the world, both real and imagined.

The upper branches not only contain new worlds but serve as doorways to others. In Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree series, every journey to the heights of this woodland giant reveals a different landscape, realms only accessible by climbing to the top and into the clouds. There are other tales of magical climbing plants and trees that appear overnight, from Jack’s fabled beanstalk to the enchanted forest in Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro. These supernatural growths are a refuge from the hard reality of earthbound lives.

Some of our great science-fiction fables also have arboreal roots. In Hothouse, Brian Aldiss portrays a dystopian future in which vegetable life has taken over the planet and all but a handful of animal species are long since extinct. The survivors subsist in the arms of a giant banyan tree covering most of the continent, battling against a host of vegetable predators. Amid all the ecological upheaval, bands of humans have reverted to a nesting existence, living in ‘nuthuts’ attached to the undersides of branches. When a character dies they are elegiacally described as having ‘fallen to the green’.

All these threads of storytelling are bound up in branches, and by climbing we pay homage to our heroes. Whether following Cosimo or countless others, we connect to a long and rich tradition. In cities, trees offer escape for mind and body, and we come closer to legend every time we step into them.

Today, climbing trees seems to be a theme that’s fading from our literature, perhaps as adults and children in turn forsake the tree tops. Where still woven into fiction it is liable to become pure fantasy, as impossible as chasing dragon tails. Could this be the harbinger of a future in which, if we climb trees at all, it will only be among the pixels of our screens rather than under the power of our own limbs? I fear the day when we are so enraptured by our own invention that we no longer interact at all with the organic world. The instinct to climb trees may finally and irreversibly be erased.

Travelling around London, I find my grim vision alleviated by the cracks in the pavement beneath trees, where thick roots have broken concrete slabs and nature has outmuscled the man-made. Nothing gives me more joy than the sight of a water main ruptured in two or a new sports car crushed under a fallen branch. Perhaps there exists an alternative future in which the vegetable world reasserts itself in our everyday consciousness, trees becoming as prized as our castles and cathedral towers. All it takes is the tap of a branch to open our eyes to another world hanging overhead.

Green Fingers

So it is also with trees, whose nature it is to stand up high. Though thou pull any bough down to the earth, such as thou mayest bend; as soon as thou lettest it go, so soon springs it up and moves towards its kind.

Metres of Boethius (King Alfred’s prose version)

This book will not tell you how to climb trees. You are, believe it or not, a natural climber, and the wherewithal to conquer nature’s scaffold lies deeply ingrained in your DNA. Rewind the clock to the first tree you ever climbed; can you remember where it stood and if it stands today? The intervening years may have stiffened muscles and added gut but the way into the trees remains open.

Not long ago I found myself stuck halfway up a giant cedar. I had struggled up the bare lower trunk, wrestling with a thick covering of ivy. Arriving at the first branches and faced with the final ascent, I found my limbs frozen stiff. A friend, who had already nimbly picked his way to the summit, looked down on me through the fronds with a self-satisfied grin. I had one knee balanced on a branch, an arm wrapped around the trunk and my nose wedged in the bark. A buttock was braced against another bough and I was bleeding from a cut to my right ear.

Climbing trees is an all-body pursuit that engages every part of your anatomy; it’s not unusual to find your forehead pressed hard against a thorny trunk, buttressing the rest of your body weight, or your legs locked off around a tree limb. The joy of climbing trees comes from their barely ordered chaos; branches balance each other, but every tree is its own bedlam. Getting hopelessly lost in this arboreal cobweb is the whole point.

Inevitably, upper-body strength helps. If you can do seventeen pull-ups hanging from the little finger of your left hand, then you have an advantage over the rest of us. The skill-set of a seasoned alpinist can be applied to bark but the novice is not ill-equipped. When exploring trees, the finer points of technique are subordinated to the haphazard joy of the climb.

This is a book with a strictly amateur philosophy. The closest many adults get to climbing trees in the 21st century is by paying for the privilege – even something so patently non-monetary has been ingeniously commercialised. You can be parted from your cash to be winched into the canopy, a harness tightened mercilessly around your genitals and a plastic helmet fused to your hair. With the overriding pain in your crotch, and your instructor swinging like an angry pendulum between you and the tree, there is little if any time for appreciating the scenery.

Such equipment might be useful for conquering otherwise unclimbable summits, the coast redwoods of Oregon or California, but the amateur goes into the trees as his ancestors left them. The examples in this book are for the spur of the moment, to be climbed with no other tools than your own hands and feet.

We live in a dangerous age in which some of our most natural and time-honoured pursuits have been rebranded. Swimming anywhere other than a plumbed and chlorinated pool and what you might have previously considered camping are now both given the prefix ‘wild’. There is no true wilderness left in Britain, so we can assume this new perception exists to distinguish between pool and pond, campsite and moorland. More disturbingly, however, the terms imply you somehow have to be ‘wild’ to partake. This could not be less true of climbing trees, an undertaking for anyone with the time and inclination.

In London, gaining a branch takes perseverance. Many of the finest specimens are impossible to scale with the simple gifts that Mother Nature bestowed upon us. The city’s trees have been clipped and coppiced, pruned and pollarded, shorn of their bottom branches and trimmed to a fault. London’s councils and park keepers do a noble job of hair-dressing, often vital to the tree’s health but at a terrible cost to the aspirant climber.

How many trees I have longed to climb and left regretfully: the silver lime by London Wall, high among Roman ruins, or the soaring arms of a copper beech in Kensal Green, shadowing the cemetery. Walking through Ranelagh Gardens or London Fields, I look longingly at centuries-old trunks, bereft of a single handhold. All across the city, countless London planes elude the climber, their complex crowns arching out of reach above the roof line.

The first and greatest challenge is reaching the lowest branch of any given tree. This is the key that opens the trapdoor to the attic, and the toughest part of almost every climb is found right at the outset. In order to gain the canopy no method is too unorthodox. Grapple and grope, claw and haul your way in; I have used tooth and nail in desperate bids to ascend a coveted tree. Sheer bloody-mindedness will often prevail, and no true tree climber gives a damn about their dignity.

The greatest single aid is a tall friend, a running jump being no substitute for a reliable shoulder. Pick climbing accomplices of a sizeable stature and you’ll transform your reach, elusive branches becoming easily attainable. Elevated from my humble five foot seven to the realm of a giant by taller men, hundreds of remote tree tops have fallen within my grasp. Many of these friends have no inclination to follow me into the trees, but for every unwilling climber there’s a committed pedestal.

There are, however, benefits to climbing alone. Just as the solo walker absorbs more of their immediate surroundings, so too the unaccompanied climber. The triumph of helping one another into a tree is a binding experience, and I like nothing better than sharing a common branch with a good friend. Yet there is something sacred about being solitary in a tree top. On my own I’m more likely to escape detection, whether by man below or beast above, and there is no compromise over which branch to choose or how far to climb. Dissecting life’s problems with an airborne friend is a fine form of counselling, but the same can be said of a tree-unto-yourself, where there is no need to have the raw experience affirmed by another. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of walking: ‘You should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace.’ I have often followed ‘the freak’ into the trees, reliant on no other agenda but my own.

I do not want this to be a technical manual. The decision to climb a tree is spontaneous and every encounter different. Rather than laying down a set of instructions, below are a few aerial insights picked up along the way.

One of the principal advantages of climbing trees over rock or ice is that a straight drop rarely confronts the climber. Unlike clinging to a cliff face, a latticework of branches intervenes between you and the ground, offering a real (or imaginary) safety net. In high summer the leaves of a tree obscure the earth below, lessening our exposure to vertical falls. The ground is glimpsed but, climbing close to the trunk, a ready anchor is always to hand.

Use the natural geometry of the tree to aid your passage. Branchless sections often provide other means of ascent, burrs for leverage or a woodpecker’s hole, and some species have bark sufficiently hard and fissured to act as a hold in its own right. The way is not always obvious and few trees grow straight. In the course of a single ascent sloped stairways can transform into vertiginous overhangs. The climber must adjust to their warp and weft.